Tim Burton biography

While his parents wanted him to go play outside and be "normal," Tim Burton preferred to soak into a 1950's horror movie, or withdraw into his own mind. Aside from watching horror movies, the Burbank-born Burton also spent much of his adolescence drawing, and after graduating from high school, he took a job as an animator at Walt Disney Studios.

Although he found that the mainstream Disney films he worked on (such as The Fox and the Hound) were far removed from his own sensibility, Disney let him have the freedom to work on his own personal projects. His first film was the six-minute animated black-and-white Vincent (1982). The stop-motion animation illustrated a poem about a boy who dreams he is horror movie veteran Vincent Price, living within a horror movie. It even featured the voice of Price himself, Burton's mentor.

His second film, the 27-minute live action Frankenweenie, was judged unsuitable for children and not released until 1992 when it finally became available on video and on the Disney Channel. Paul Reubens (aka Pee-Wee Herman), however, did get to see it and decided that Burton, still only in his mid-twenties, would be the ideal person to direct his feature debut, Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985). It was an enormous (and surprise) box-office hit.

Then came the supernatural comedy Beetlejuice (1988), starring Michael Keaton. The success of both projects and their unique art direction led him to Batman (1989), a big and expensive production that Warner Bros. had been sitting on for ten years. It was one of the most successful films of all time, setting the opening weekend box office record of $50 million and going on to make $400 million world wide. It gave Burton unprecedented power in Hollywood considering the originality and adventurousness of his work thus far.

Burton consolidated his position as the Hollywood wonderkid of the early '90s with Edward Scissorhands (1990), a very personal suburban fable of a youth (Johnny Depp) with scissor shears instead of hands who is befriended by a local woman who decides to bring him home. It was also the beginning of a continuous working relationship with Depp, who would go on to appear in several of his future films.

Batman Returns (1992) was a far darker and quirkier film than the original, a reflection of how much creative freedom Burton had won (though Warner Bros were reputedly unhappy with the final result). Burton cites it as the film he feels the most detached from of all his projects.

Burton returned to animation with his next feature as the producer, creator, and guiding sensibility behind Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), a wildly imaginative excursion into the macabre that initially began as a poem. While not directed by Burton, the film boasted his trademark visual and thematic concerns, including expressionist lighting, stylized and detailed production design, unrequited love, a misunderstood protagonist on the outside of society, and a lively score by Danny Elfman. Besides having the distinction of being the first full length stop-motion animated film produced by Disney, it is the film that is deeper in Burton's heart than any other, as he had been wanting to make it for over a decade.

Burton remained at Disney for his return to the director's chair with his first period piece, the biopic Ed Wood (1994). Shot in black and white, the film starred Johnny Depp as "the world's worst director" and featured Martin Landau as a debilitated Bela Lugosi. While the film was smaller in scope than his last three outings, Ed Wood was also the first Burton movie to be grounded in a truthful, if bizarre, historical reality. Despite being a box office disaster, it garnered some of the best reviews of Burton's career and won two Oscars.

Once engaged to actress Lisa Marie, whom he dated from 1992 to 2001, Burton is now engaged to actress Helena Bonham Carter. They live in adjoining houses in London. Carter gave birth to their son, Billy Ray, on October 6, 2003.